Kevin Walter Bob John

This boy was at the beach, and he was being irritated by several strange children. They were in the water just miles and miles away, and yet they were so extremely loud and obnoxious that he could hear them anyway. They were yelling names at him. They weren’t bad names like Fatacake, Heartfeet, Bonsai, or Justin Beiber, but instead they were names like Kevin, Walter, Bob, and John. Yes. The boy could hear the voices carrying across the water like small vessels of supreme annoyance. He stared at the motley crew of bellowers. He glared at the hollering banshees. Why were they yelling at him anyway? Couldn’t they go bother some other people? And yet, they persisted.

The boy tried to not pay them too much attention. He rolled his eyes and kept splashing his cousin Philharmonic Tummis with salty ocean water. It got into his eyes and then Philharmonic Tummis had to leave and go to the beach’s small and dirty bathroom where he could pump the salt out of his eyes but leave with flesh eating bacteria in his ears. The boy, newly lonely without his cousin, decided that he was just about fed up with the people across the water. He climbed out of the ocean and stood by his parents, Sal and Thora, who were grilling weasel waffles on a, um, grill made for that sort of cuisine. “Those kids are yelling at me.” He told them.

“Maybe you should yell back.” They said.

He ate part of an apple and nodded. Mostly because he thought he may have seaweed in his left nostril and he thought nodding, for some odd reason, would shake it out. “Huh.” He said, and then trotted back down to the water and tried to sneak past the kids who had been yelling at him so loudly. Unfortunately, they saw him and sent out their secret weapon, a little girl around eight years old. She had brown hair, dripping wet and to her chin, and beady little blue eyes.

“They think your name is Kevin Walter Bob John.” She told the boy.

“Well, it’s not.” He told her back. 

The kids yelled at him again and he’d finally had enough. He swam towards them.

“Hey, Kevin.” Said one girl, who was wearing a sawdust hat and had lightning shaped glasses rims. “We missed you!”

The boy blinked. He didn’t know these people. How could they possibly miss him? “Um.” He replied, but not very coherently. 

“What’s your real name?” Asked the other girl, and she had her arms crossed against her chest. She had glitter thrown all around her eyes and nose and ears. The boy thought it made her look like a My Little Pony reject, but she probably thought it made her look pretty. If it made her confident enough to yell at strange boys at the beach, it must be doing something right, the boy thought, and then realized she had asked him a question. 

“I don’t want to…” He also realized that he didn’t want to tell them his name, but he wanted to keep talking to them anyway. It was the lightning glasses girl, the My Little Pony glitter child, the young girl who had coerced him into coming over there in the first place, a boy who looked slightly constipated but also like he had too much laughing gas at the dentist’s office, another boy who had shockingly red hair and a galaxy of freckles smattered about his face, and the last boy, who seemed to be the first boy’s brother and was currently trying to string a piece of yarn through his toes underwater. “Can you guess my name?”

The lightning girl scoffed slightly and the galaxy of freckles chortled like a broken fax machine. “What is this? Rumpetydumpdumpsliskin?”

The boy was pretty sure that wasn’t what the freckle galaxy was trying to say, but he was on a roll and he didn’t feel like burning his bridges quite yet. “Yeah. Kind of. Guess my name and then…. You’ll know it, I guess.” 

“Okay!” Yelled the motley crew, and then they launched into a massacre of names. They pelted names from history, storybooks, dictionaries, pop culture, the kitchen cabinet, the zoology handbook, the electronics department… anything they could think of as a name. They were overthinking it.

Finally, after over ten minutes of frantically bombarding the boy with name ideas, the lightning rim glasses girl said, “Is your name ******?” 

It was indeed. The boy stared back at them in shock. How had they broken through the code? How could they have deciphered his name? It was all too much. He had to leave. He had to jump in his car and drive away. No one could know who he was. He had seen too much, heard too much, and said too much already. 

“Um, yes.” He said, his heart thundered in his chest and threatening to break through his ribs and drown in the ocean water. “It is.”

The group rejoiced! “Can we guess your last name, now?”

The boy shook his head. “No!”

“What about your mother’s name? Can we try and guess that?”

“Um, still no! I have to go. I have to leave.” He scurried to his truck and gave his parents the emergency signal. They swept all their food off the table and tossed the tablecloth into the back of the vehicle. “Bye!” He called to the group, knowing what they would never know.

He sat in the backseat as the truck rocked forward, wondering what would have happened if he had stayed. Would he be safe… or would he already be dead and gone, a lifeless shell of the creature he once was? The boy sighed and put his head in his hands. If only he was fully human again; if only he didn’t have to be such a secret anymore. The wings at the back of his shoulders rubbed against the truck’s seat. Being a were-turkey was such hard work sometimes. 

THE END